Is Donald Trump a bad person? Does he have a dark heart? As I’ve written before, I’ve been a Donald Trump fan for years and watched most of his apprentice shows. Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Tim Kaine said that Trump enjoyed firing people - my impression is that sometimes he did and sometimes he didn’t. As with anyone, if he liked the person that he had to fire he didn’t enjoy it and if he was fed up with the person then he did enjoy firing him. I’ve been trying to figure him out ever since he announced his candidacy as to where his heart and his real passions lye.
I do believe that Trump is a patriot and I believe that his father whom he models himself so much after taught him that. As I see it, Trump believes in the American exceptionalism idea, feels that we shouldn’t be taken advantage of by other countries because of ideologies of free trade or that you shouldn’t be able stand up to countries who have emerged from the 3rd world much of what China and Mexico were, not that long ago. He also believes that criminals and terrorists shouldn’t be able to stifle the law and order that Americans enjoyed for much - but certainly not of our recent history. Crime took over much of our cities since the mid 60’s to come down a lot towards the end of the 90’s and terrorism threatened the security of the civilized world starting from the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 then onto the Munich massacre in 1972 and the rest is history.
Trump is obviously a very successful businessman even though those on the left want to point at his bankruptcies of a few companies but anyone in finance knows that not every business works out and even a good stock analyst will buy some clunkers over time. Those like Gloria Steinem who don’t have a clue about business and think that Trump could have made the same amount had he just invested his money in the S & P over the same time, are ignoring one very basic thing and that is that what he owns now is after he used all that money for his living expenses, recreating and political donations and there are those who say that he has been very charitable as well.
Essentially Trump is a successful builder and one could argue that even his foray into casino business in Atlantic City was a divergence from his core business of building structures to rent out to others or to sell.
Obviously his dilly dallying with all of his side businesses were just a silly ambition that he could get even get much richer by just slapping his name on any number of things like Trump Steaks - vodka - airlines - water - mortgages etc and in that way I don’t blame all those who make fun of those things. But for Bloomberg to say that Trump is just a con man is just Bloomberg catering to the left since he doesn’t believe in the NRA which Trump is now allied with, but the core of Trump’s business wealth does not come from him being a con man - rather the opposite - one could say that Trump was one of the pioneers to bring back NYC from its demise in the early 70’s. That’s when Trump bought and renovated the Commodore Hotel, something that many thought was just a useless pile of bricks in a non desirable location.
Many don’t remember the seriously bad condition NYC was in at that time, when we almost went bankrupt and Jerold Ford was famously quoted as saying to NY “go to hell” as far as bailing it out with federal funds. There was also during that period a heavy migration out of NYC and NYS to other states. Today’s Gen X’ers or millennials don’t even know that Manhattan itself wasn’t always cool and now we see how desirable Manhattan is that is has the power to create gentrification of even the most hitherto blighted areas like Harlem, Williamsburg and Bushwick.
Regarding Trump’s integrity - it did bother me about his history of Trump University - that it seemed like it was a sham of a learning institution with predatory tuition demands to accompany the learning steps to graduate the “university". I wondered why he wouldn’t just want to give people their money back considering the number of people who were unhappy with the experience and my answer is that Trump had little to do with that the same way he had little to do with his other unserious business ventures. Furthermore, he was silly enough to believe that if students gave a high assessment rating, right after the graduation or completion of the course - under the watchful eye of the instructor - that that meant that they really were very satisfied with the course, not realizing that that can be an obligatory or somewhat coerced type of rating. Being taught, no doubt by his father, not to bow to pressure from those students to give them back their money, he opted instead to take it to court where it will be determined whether he was right for not giving in to the demands for a refund. A real con man would not let it go to court because he is not judgment proof and presumably his defense is not a bankruptcy proceeding - if it were - the case would not proceed on the merits of the case.
The feud that he had with Megyn Kelly really bothered me. Why wouldn’t he be able to handle a simple straight forward question about the language he used when he argued, as a NY personality, with different women or men, calling some of those women names that are derogatory? The truth is that as we now know, Trump was really a pioneer in another area as well - that of hiring women to executive positions when none of the other builders were doing that. As such, he was insulted that someone whom he had indeed respected as a very capable journalist, contrary to the reactive tweets of his, he got insulted and felt that he should no longer talk with her. Smart? No. But he felt “ba’avled” that he could be questioned to be a mysogonist when he knew that he in fact was not.
I could go on and on about how he is being misread by the punditry and much of the general population - independents and college educated voters. Let me give one last example of something that someone told me why he could never vote for Trump and that was the allusion that Trump made that if Hillary were to become president that there’s nothing that could be done to stop her from nominating liberals to the Supreme Court - then adding except those who believe in the 2nd amendment - that maybe they could, implication being that those with guns could assassinate her - saying “I don’t know” under his breath after that. He later twisted this to mean that of course he meant that the NRA people have power in numbers and would stop any such bad nomination to the highest court. The real meaning was - no real meaning - it was just a stupid tasteless joke that he made to look cool to the NRA people - a group that as a “NYker” he never identified with anyway. When Trump had "NY values" he agreed with curbing gun rights.
The moral of the story is that I believe that as Bill O’Reilly says about Trump that Trump is a marketer and he said things in the primary that he would never do to attract attention and to show that he’s more tough than Ted Cruz and the rest. Trump would never throw out of the country hardworking illegals who are parents of American children and he would not execute the families of terrorists who were not found to be part of the terrorist acts. How do I know this? Because he never repeats any of these absurdities! He says these things the same way he has gold plated faucets in his Trump Tower apartment - he’s a showman and a marketer. Only thing is that he is a poor marketer when it comes to showing the segments of the electorate who don’t “get him” that he really is thought-out, visionary and extremely productive when it comes to business that he really knows and cares about - namely the building trade.
So what does he know about being a president of the United States? Answer: the same way he was a visionary about bringing back NY city to its former glory so he could be a visionary for the country. Our country is losing much of its former identity that of being a Judeo-Christian (meaning civilized and law abiding) country with a work ethic that made us the envy of the world. He also understands that we shouldn’t fight wars in Vietnam and Iraq with enormous loss of blood and treasure and nothing to show for it. Hillary, on the other hand, thinks its a triviality to put our national security in jeopardy and doesn’t take seriously the gravity of our foreign dignitaries when they are pleading for their safety for something to be done. I’d rather have someone who throws a crying baby out of a political rally than have someone weasel every time they’re asked about jeopardizing our national security, throws her allegiance to a movement of anti semites and who promote violence against cops and answers “What difference does it make?” when it comes to her answering questions about Benghazi. Trump has much to learn about the political world both policy and political but he is demonstrating that he can learn what he doesn’t know. I don’t know that Hillary can overcome her deceitfulness, carelessness, callousness and shame that she has of being American, white and Christian.
Comments